Untitled 13Ghosts Fic
by Elisabeta
Summary: Dennis-fic set before the movie.
1. The Existence of ESP

Title: Currently untitled 13 Ghosts Fic ;) Author: Lizzie (ravens_slavegirl@yahoo.co.uk) Rating: Eventually R, but this part's probably G. I can't remember if I cursed in it or not, so I'll say PG to be sure. Disclaimer: Not mine, don't sue. Summary: Not really long enough for there to be a summary yet. Set before the movie, this is a fic about Dennis and how he came to be involved with Cyrus' dream. Notes: This is only the first chapter. It'll be much, much longer when I'm through, believe me. Proving the existence of ESP was never going to be an easy affair. Since the very coining of the phrase, Extra-Sensory Perception had been dismissed as fantasy and condemned to the realm of Science Fiction; no reputable academic had dared to touch on it, if not simply due to its fantastical nature, because to do so would be to commit academic suicide.  
  
This Dr. Erik Heilmann knew all too well - he had, after all, sacrificed his credibility for the sake of writing the definitive paper on the subject, which had since been published and republished in many popular psychology journals. The paper received mixed reviews.  
  
Heilmann's fascination with ESP had its roots early in his childhood. As many children do, he had had a phase of utter belief in his own supernatural power - that if he could concentrate hard enough, want it enough, he could become invisible, walk through walls, move objects with his mind, predict the change of traffic signals. And as is the case with most children, his belief faded in time. The difference between Erik Heilmann and most children, however, was that whilst the phase eventually ended, his fascination never did.  
  
As a child, Dr. Heilmann had been utterly absorbed by the world of the comicbook hero. He keeps his childhood collection to this day. And at twelve years old, he discovered Science Fiction when his father shared his collection of HG Wells novels. He revelled in this world where men travelled back and forth through time, where telepathy and precognition were commonplace. At thirteen years old, he wanted to be a writer himself. He had so many wonderful stories to tell.  
  
Then one day it dawned on him that there was a whole world awaiting discovery outside of Science Fiction, and as soon as he was old enough to realise that a legitimate field of study existed, his interest was wholly transferred to Psychology. Reading books at lunch in his high school library, Erik soon realised that the human mind was where his interest should lay. He saw such untapped power, such inexplicable capacity, and knew that he'd discovered the work to which he would dedicate the rest of his natural life.  
  
At twenty-four, Erik James Heilmann received his doctorate, and, on the strength of his dissertation, a post with the University of Massachusetts. The university was well aware of his research interests, and although scorned by those more distinguished within the profession, he was allowed to pursue those interests. The simple fact of the matter was that the outlandish nature of Dr. Heilmann's work attracted more funding than that of the remainder of the department faculty combined. As is always the case, it all came down to money. Even then, when he was just starting out, back in 1971.  
  
Over the following years, Heilmann became renowned for his unwavering dedication to his research, despite less than promising results. He published paper after paper on the strength of his test subjects, though always careful to acknowledge the shortcomings of his testing. Thanks in no small part to his efforts, some credibility was lent to the field. That, if nothing else, pleased him.  
  
But as the years passed, he became increasingly frustrated. It seemed that over half of the cases referred to him were little more than clever frauds or convincing delusionals, and the rest showed such sporadic accuracy in their testing that the results were rendered corrupt and inadmissible. His belief in the existence of ESP had, however, only increased, and that was at the heart of his frustration. He resented the fact that something in which he held such a profound belief, which had advocated so strenuously, could be so widely dismissed.  
  
Shortly after his forty-ninth birthday, his wife of fifteen years, and fellow psychologist, gently suggested that he transfer his research interests to her area of study; she had a successful program running in abnormal psychology, and offered him a position with her team. Two weeks later, to his wife's delight, he accepted the offer.  
  
Seven years later, Erik Heilmann found himself at the forefront of his flourishing field. In addition to his classes at UMass, his expertise was often enlisted for many more complex investigations by various police departments and infrequently the FBI, and during the summer he found time to give worldwide lecture tours. He was a guest speaker at forty-three universities and wrote nine books on Psychology, all very well received by his critics and peers alike. And most importantly, Erik found that this work satisfied him. He was an acknowledged expert in both Psychology and Criminology; finally he had the acceptance he had always craved.  
  
One evening following a conference in Geneva - at which he had had the honour of being the main speaker - his wife told him that after years in the wilderness, metaphorically speaking, he had found his way home. He had to agree.  
  
Three days later, back in his office at UMass, he met Dennis Rafkin. And his whole world fell apart.  
  
*** 


	2. The Kriticos Family Fortune

Part 2  
  
The Kriticos family fortune fell to Cyrus in the fall of his twenty-first year. The news came whilst he and his two younger brothers were away at Harvard - the executor of their father's estate - a lawyer named Franklin Moss - arrived early in the evening of October 12th and delivered the news in person. The three brothers were sitting down to dinner when he was shown into the room. Two of them didn't eat a thing that night.  
  
The news of their father's death was not unexpected; his lung cancer had remained untreated for over six months and the brothers had been doing their best to reconcile themselves to the fact that Charles Kriticos was indeed going to die. By that night, the three brothers were ready. They took the news well. In fact, the two youngest were quite simply relieved that their father's suffering was over at last.  
  
Moss carried the will in his briefcase. Whilst not legally permitted to read it until the following morning - in the presence of the whole family and other interested parties - he alluded obliquely to several clauses. It did not come as a surprise that the bulk of the estate would go to Cyrus; William and Samuel had all the money they could ever possibly need held in trust until their twenty-first birthdays, and it was, of course, tradition that the family estate pass to the first-born son. Everything was as it should have been. There were no contestations of the will. The family was satisfied.  
  
Until, five years later, Cyrus cut all access to the family accounts. Then tempers flared, along with lawsuits. But there was nothing to be done - Cyrus had every right to cut access. It was, after all, his money, and his estate. It began to dawn on William and Samuel, their wives, their children, their aunts and uncles, their cousins, the whole extended Kriticos family, that Cyrus had only ever agreed to their allowances to assuage any thoughts they might have harboured to contest the will. He was smart. He'd waited five years and now there wasn't a thing they could do. Cyrus had everything; he cut them all off without a penny. Even the trust funds were reclaimed.  
  
After that, most of the family moved away. Samuel, Charles' second son, moved out to his wife's home state of California. Aunt Adriana and Uncle Andrius moved to a retirement community in Florida. Some of the older family members moved back to Greece, the original motherland of the Kriticos family. In fact, apart from Cyrus, the only family members who hadn't moved within a year of the allowance being severed were William Kriticos, his wife Marta and their two-year-old son Arthur.  
  
They were the only ones nearby when the fortune began to disappear.  
  
*** 


	3. The Borehamwood Institute

Part 3  
  
A little over six months before his meeting with Dr. Heilmann, Dennis was admitted to the Borehamwood Institute. Not long after his twenty-third birthday, his care entrusted to Dr. Marcus Beck, head of the institute; he'd been referred to Borehamwood by his previous psychiatrist, a Dr. Christopher Van Bremen, following several psychotic, sometimes violent, and as yet unexplained episodes; Dennis had a pathological fear of being touched, and seemed to suffer acute pain from physical contact with any living creature. Dr. Van Bremen had been able to offer no explanation for this, and despite his best efforts, it seemed Dennis' condition was deteriorating.  
  
Whilst not officially committed, it was agreed that without proper treatment Dennis may have proven a danger to himself and to others. He was asked by both Drs. Beck and Van Bremen to voluntarily admit himself to the Institute. It took only moments for Dennis to agree.  
  
On their first meeting, soon after Dennis' arrival, Dr. Beck offered him his hand; Dennis simply shook his head and took his seat. It wasn't until two months had passed that Dr. Beck found a logical reason for this - it seemed Dennis had been abused as a child. His parents had divorced when he was nine, and shortly following his father's move to Seattle, his mother had remarried. His stepbrother - the twenty-one-year-old son of his stepfather from his first marriage - was the one who abused him. And he didn't mind talking about it. Dennis answered every one of Dr. Beck's questions honestly. He told him what his stepbrother had done to him, how often, for how long, even how it made him feel. The childhood sexual abuse had to be at the heart of Dennis' condition.  
  
Yet Dennis insisted that it wasn't. And if he were honest with himself, Dr. Beck knew that Dennis' attitude toward his past abuse suggested that whilst indeed traumatic, it had not had as destructive an effect on his personality as one might expect. Dennis was at peace with his past. And once Dr. Beck admitted that, he was back to square one.  
  
Beck found himself frustrated for the first time in his professional career. He could find no psychological basis for Dennis' psychosis, and that failure plagued him to the point where he was finally willing to call in a psychiatrist from outside the Institute. But that didn't happen.  
  
As Dennis was leaving Dr. Beck's office after their session one afternoon, he tripped and fell. Instinctively, Beck moved to aid him, hoping to help him upright by his arm. That didn't happen.  
  
Dennis froze under his hand. And then he shook. Then he moaned, then murmured something. Dr. Beck tried to move him onto his back - it seemed like he could lapse into a seizure at any moment. But he didn't. Dennis stared up at him, his eyes wide.  
  
"What is it, Dennis?" Beck asked, his hands moving to his shoulders.  
  
"Get the fuck off of me!" Dennis screamed, scrambling away, cowering back against the wall.  
  
Beck jerked away in surprised. He had, of course read Dr. Van Bremen's notes, and so he should have been prepared for Dennis' reaction, but in two months he had seen no physical manifestation of Dennis' fears. Until that moment.  
  
"It's all right, Dennis", Beck told him, kneeling down beside him. "How do you feel?"  
  
"Like I stepped in front of a fucking freight train", came the reply, as Dennis rubbed circles over his temples. "Dr. Van Bremen used to give me pills for this. They helped".  
  
Beck shifted his weight and Dennis flinched. Beck shook his head slowly. "Don't worry, I'm not going to touch you again", he told him, standing, heading back to his seat. "But Dennis, I'm sorry, I can't prescribe your medication until I'm sure of your condition".  
  
Dennis nodded. "Yeah, I know", he muttered, pulling himself to his feet. "I'm gonna go now, okay? I, I can't handle this right now. Okay?"  
  
Beck nodded. "I'll see you tomorrow, Dennis".  
  
The door opened, but instead of leaving the room, Dennis turned to the doctor.  
  
"You spend too much time here, Dr. Beck", he said, leaning against the doorframe, his head cocked to one side. "Did you forget your wife's making dinner tonight?"  
  
Beck tried to say something. But before he could force out the words, Dennis had left the room. That was the moment that it first occurred to Dr. Beck that there was something else at work - something that he wasn't sure psychiatry could explain.  
  
He'd never even told Dennis that he was married, let alone that his family was waiting at home. His daughter had got her acceptance letter for Yale pre-law and to celebrate his wife was making lasagne, their favourite.  
  
*** 


	4. Cyrus' Travels

Part 4  
  
There was an old plot of land out by the wood where the Kriticos boys had played as children. It wasn't far from their home - the borders of the family estate lay just at the other side of the wood, and they could see the house through the trees. It was a small clearing of lush green grass and wildflowers where they'd spent half their happy childhoods. Cyrus had always said he would buy that land one day. He was forty-two years old when he finally did it.  
  
He hadn't set foot in the country for over five years by that the time the deal went through - he left his lawyers in charge. Franklin Moss, his father's lawyer, and his son Ben Moss, were the ones who bought the land, while Cyrus was out in Italy.  
  
To be precise, at the time of the sale, Cyrus was in Venice. He had just arrived there from Rome, where he'd spent a little over three months. In fact, over the five years he'd been out of the country, Cyrus had travelled Europe almost in its entirety; Paris, Monaco, Barcelona, Madrid, Lisbon, Malaga, Valencia, Ankara, Istanbul, Odessa, Marseille, Turin, Milan, Naples, Bucharest, Budapest, Sofia, Kiev, Warsaw, Vienna, Salzburg, Berlin, Munich, Zurich, Bern, Geneva, London. He'd been to places that the family had never heard of.  
  
No one was sure why he was travelling, not even his trusted lawyers. After the completion of his undergraduate degree in Theology, Cyrus had been expected to further his studies, perhaps in the masters' program or studying for a doctorate. He did neither, instead becoming a recluse, rarely setting foot outside of his estate. Then suddenly, the news came that he had not only left the estate but also travelled to Europe, where he remained, moving from city to city, for over five years. No information came through on what exactly he was doing there, aside from visits to all the usual tourist spots, and a few antique bookshops.  
  
But the money kept rolling out. His accountants, though obliged to keep their client's affairs confidential, were friends of his brother William, and passed on what information they could. Most of the sums were simple if expensive hotel charges, but a few stood out; ten thousand dollars spent in three days in Lisbon seemed a little out of the ordinary, for a start. Then there was a cheque for thirty thousand written in Ankara, Turkey, followed by fifty thousand in Madrid and another fifty thousand in Barcelona. Cyrus spent a hundred thousand dollars in Toledo and three hundred thousand in Rome. And no one knew what it was that he was buying for these enormous sums of money, when all he ever shipped home were books for his library. Surely books, however rare and antique, couldn't be consuming the family fortune.  
  
But at the time that the land came into his possession - after seven years of negotiation with the family - Cyrus was in Venice. He had, according to William's contacts in the city, spent all four days of his stay so far visiting with a restorer of antique books in a back street not far from the Piazza San Marco; no doubt he would have spent many weeks there in the city, speaking with many more dealers, or so the family thought. Still, as soon as he heard the news that his bid had been accepted and that the land was now his, Cyrus booked a first class seat on the first plane home.  
  
Little did his family realise it, but his return was only partially sparked by the acquisition of the land. He'd found what he'd been looking for all those years. His long wait was over, as was his research. He knew what he had to do. Cyrus Kriticos was about to realise his lifelong dream.  
  
*** 


	5. The Borehamwood Ghost

Part 5  
  
The Borehamwood Institute was a mass of concrete and steel built sometime in the late 1970's by an especially uninspired architect under contract to the US government. It was completed in a little over six months and since its opening had never had more than three empty rooms at any one time.  
  
The Institute housed the main psychiatric department of the local hospital, and running the department was Dr. Elijah Beck. When Dennis Rafkin was admitted, just short of two hundred and fifty patients inhabited the sterile white wards and there were fifty full-time staff members, including nineteen doctors. Dennis filled the last available bed.  
  
Dr. Beck was one of the most respected men in his profession, and had resigned a position with a top German institute - one of the most highly thought of establishments in the world - in order to take his present job at Borehamwood. He enticed along many of his old colleagues from over the years, many prominent figures in their own right. Many had published papers and books on the subject and given lectures, some had been teachers and lecturers, some brilliant clinical psychiatrists come from respected hospitals worldwide. It had taken only three years for the Institute itself to gain just as much respect as its staff. Psychiatry had never seen such a success.  
  
Of course, the success wasn't due simply to the general day-to-day work of Dr. Beck and his colleagues. There was a logic to the position of the Institute - it was located several miles out of the nearest town, on a low hill surrounded by wide, flat fields and a high, electrified fence topped with razor wire. And the reason for this - not only did the building house the Borehamwood Psychiatric Hospital, but the Borehamwood Institute for the Criminally Insane.  
  
Abnormal Psychology was the main focus of research for the majority of the staff. The relatively small seventy-bed wing at the rear of the hospital, hidden from view, was kept wholly separate from the hospital, the murderers, serial rapists and various other psychopaths, sociopaths and violent psychotics were never allowed to interact with the main body of the hospital's patients. In fact, the only two common factors of two sections were the building that housed them and the doctors that moved between the two. The nurses and general staff were two separate sets, one working in each section. It was as if the main hospital was the respectable front for their dirty pleasure, the wing where the money and careers were made.  
  
The only doctor not to moonlight in the Abnormal Psych wing was Dr. Beck himself. His interests lay purely in the patients of the hospital, not that his administrative duties would have permitted him any time elsewhere even if he'd wished it. Back in college he'd made the decision to stay out of Abnormal Psychology - he'd left that to his roommate and good friend, Erik Heilmann.  
  
In a career spanning forty years, Elijah Beck avoided Abnormal Psychology completely. That is, until three months into the treatment of Dennis Rafkin.  
  
It was summer, and sometimes in summer Dr. Beck liked to conduct his sessions outside in the courtyard . The building was in the shape of a large square, with an open square courtyard in the centre - the front side of the square, facing the road, and the two sides, made up the hospital, and the back served as, for want of better words, the asylum. And that day, under the bright summer sun, Beck had decided to see Dennis outside. He regretted it.  
  
They hadn't been making much progress. Dennis hadn't been able to explain his miraculous guess, and Beck had since treated it as just that. He had, however, wondered about Dennis' reaction when he'd touched him - it obviously wasn't normal but he couldn't find an explanation for it for the life of him. Dennis just didn't want anyone to touch him, obviously for fear of this physical pain he seemed to feel, but he wouldn't talk about it. Beck had been toying with the idea of touching him again, just casually patting him on the back or resting a hand on his shoulder, to test the reaction, but he realised that was rather unethical. He'd decided against it. But he did want to at least attempt to get Dennis to talk about why he was so scared of physical contact.  
  
They sat on a bench at the side of the pond, which was covered over with wire mesh for fairly obvious reasons - an open pond in the middle of a psychiatric hospital wouldn't exactly have been the greatest of ideas. There were flowers and small shrubs all around, on all sides of the pond around the light grey stone paving stones that served as a path through the garden. Dennis seemed more relaxed then usual outside, after being cooped up in the hospital for over two months. Dr. Beck decided to broach the subject again, and hoped that the new surroundings may have an effect on his willingness to talk.  
  
"Dennis, you remember the day in my office", he started, looking up from his notebook, tapping his pencil absently against the back of his wrist. "When you tripped and I tried to help you up."  
  
"Yeah, Doc, I remember", Dennis said, nodding. "What about it?"  
  
"Well, I was wondering - when I touched you, and you moved away, what was it that made you do that?"  
  
Dennis shrugged and took a deep breath, uncrossing his legs and stroking the heels of his hands down over his thighs over and over, staring up over the top of the building into the cloudless blue sky. Beck didn't take that as a good sign.  
  
"Dennis, what did you feel?"  
  
"It hurt".  
  
"It hurts when people touch you, is that what you're saying?"  
  
"I told you that before. It hurts. I don't wanna be touched 'cause. 'cause I get these, these *pains* in my head. It hurts".  
  
"Dennis, why does it hurt? What happens to you?"  
  
Dennis shrugged again, staring down at his knees now. "I don't know. I. Sometimes I see things".  
  
Beck frowned. "You see things? Like what? What do you see?" Dennis bit his lip. "Dennis, what do you see?"  
  
"Just, flashes. I get these flashes. Like I see people's lives flash before my eyes, some kinda freaky-ass slide show in my head. And it feels like someone jammed a needle in my brain, every time. Okay?" Dennis glanced up at Beck. "I told you. So can we drop this now?"  
  
"You're telling me you're psychic?"  
  
"Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm telling you. I'm psychic. I touch someone and I get a whole lifetime's worth of shit I don't wanna know all poured into my head. Why do you think I'm so screwed up? I accidentally brushed up against my bank manager and found out he likes to touch up his eight-year- old niece. My kindergarten teacher tortured animals as a kid. That orderly who brought me up to your office the first day? He has the biggest collection of gay porn on the Eastern seaboard. And you. well, the worst thing you ever did was forget to feed your daughter's goldfish when she was away skiing in Vermont. Quit beating yourself up already - that was eight years ago".  
  
Dr. Beck just stared at him. He'd never told anyone about that, not even his wife. He'd never mentioned how he'd been too wrapped up in a case to remember that he'd promised to feed Rachel's pet goldfish, how one morning he'd found it floating at the top of the tank, how he'd taken the afternoon off work to find one just like it in the local pet store. He'd buried the dead fish in the back yard and prayed to God that the neighbour's dog wouldn't dig it up. No one had ever noticed the difference.  
  
"How did you know that?" he asked in a low voice, frowning, narrowing his eyes as he looked at him. "I didn't tell anyone about that".  
  
Dennis smiled. "I told you, Doc - I'm psychic".  
  
"But."  
  
"Fuck!"  
  
Dr. Beck watched as a kind of ripple went down Dennis' spine, wrenching his head back and knocking his to the ground. He fell from the bench and to his knees on the paving stones in front of the pond.  
  
"Dennis?"  
  
Dennis clutched at his head, seizing again. He lurched forward, his head hitting the stones with a sickening thud.  
  
"Dennis, what is it?"  
  
He was breathing hard. Dr. Beck knelt down beside him, and moved to put his hand on his shoulder - Dennis lurched under his touch and he yanked his hand away. Dennis was trembling. Then he started to shake. He hadn't knocked himself out, but there was an ugly red mark on his forehead and a thin trickle of blood running down his face. He turned to the doctor.  
  
"We need to get away from here", he murmured.  
  
"What is it? Do you see something?"  
  
"Please, we need to get inside. Please. It's not safe". The fear in Dennis' eyes was indescribable; it made Dr. Beck's heart hammer wildly in his chest.  
  
"Dennis, Dennis, there's nothing here. It's okay, really. There's nothing here", he said in as soothing a tone as he could muster, trying to reassure him. Obviously it wasn't working; Dennis just shook his head, hard.  
  
"You're wrong. You're. you're *wrong*". He was rocking back and forth, on his knees now, the heel of one hand jammed up hard against his temple. "He didn't want to be touched. They wanted to save him but. but he wouldn't let them. Oh God, God, he. he burned to death. He burned to death before he let them touch him".  
  
"Who, Dennis? Who?"  
  
The sound Dennis was making, a high, strained whine, made Dr. Beck's heart beat even faster. People were staring. There were faces in all the windows and orderlies were rushing toward them; Beck raised a hand and stopped them from coming too close, from touching Dennis, from hauling him inside.  
  
"Dennis, who is it? Who did you see?"  
  
"Ryan Kuhn. His name's Ryan Kuhn. He died here ninety years ago. He fucking burned to death and he's pissed as all hell. Now get me the fuck inside!"  
  
*** 


	6. The Book of the Nine Gates of the Kingdo...

--6--  
  
As a child, Cyrus' only playmate was an imaginary friend named 'Fay. His father, a distinguished scholar with a self-professed expert knowledge of child psychology, found nothing unusual in this; he naturally assumed that it was a childhood phase and that Cyrus would eventually outgrow it, as was so often documented. And to some extent he was right - Cyrus did eventually stop playing with 'Fay. Their long afternoons in the clearing by the wood came to an end when Cyrus was nine years old.  
  
But at night, when Cyrus and his brothers were supposed to be praying the rosary before bed, he talked to Fay. He held the rosary in his hand - the one his mother had given him for his twelfth birthday, just three weeks before she'd died - and instead of praying, he talked. He didn't believe that Fay talked back, so it wasn't like a conversation. But the point was that he talked to him, not that he expected a reply. It was only important that he talk.  
  
He'd tell him about his day, about the kids at school, about his homework assignments, about his brothers. As the years went by, he'd tell him about the girls he liked, about his friends who he knew were only friends to his money. He told him about the night he lost his virginity - in fact, the rosary was there in his schoolbag sitting by the bed, and after they'd finished he went into the bathroom and whispered out he whole story. When the girl, a cute little thing with strawberry blonde hair and the most beautiful body Cyrus had ever seen, walked in and asked him coyly if he was coming back to bed, he threw her out. He literally pushed her out through the motel room door and threw her clothes out after her. He sat down on the bed and continued to talk after he was sure she was gone.  
  
His roommate at Harvard once asked him whom he thought he was talking to. Cyrus smiled oddly and told him he was praying. It wasn't far from the truth, really; with the rosary in his hand, talking to someone who wasn't there, he guessed it was like praying.  
  
His major was Theology, and he studied hard. He was top of his class, by virtue of his insightful papers and extensive knowledge of the subject; it seemed he spent every waking moment in the university or department libraries, or in his room with a book brought from his father's home library. He graduated at the top of his class, which surprised no one. What did surprise was the fact that Cyrus never officially furthered his education; his tutors all believed he could have gone on to become one of the foremost academics in the area, and perhaps that was true. However, Cyrus had other plans.  
  
His brother William doubted that his travel and expenditure in Europe was simply in pursuit of rare books. He was wrong - that was exactly the point of Cyrus' visit. He visited rare book dealers all over the continent, buying up all the rare theological books that he could locate. And there were two particular areas of study within the general subject that interested him over all others - Demonology, and the study of Hell.  
  
Cyrus made and maintained few friends over the years, but one of whose acquaintance he was particularly proud was billionaire industrialist Boris Balkan; he and Boris had been college roommates and had kept in touch since their graduation. Balkan had made a fortune in industry, but the money was not what made Cyrus so especially proud of their friendship. It was instead that fact that Balkan was an acknowledged authority in the area of the Christian religion and in Demonology in particular. And of course the extensive library which Balkan kept on the top floor of his New York offices - a library dedicated in its entirety to the devil - held for Cyrus a glorious allure.  
  
Few people had the privilege of entrance to this library, but Cyrus was one of them. Both before and after his travels in Europe he spent countless hours ensconced in that library, reading from Balkan's unbelievably extensive collection. But, as Balkan himself often lamented, there was one text of extreme significance that was missing from his library.  
  
During the fifteenth century, Venetian theologian Aristide Torchia wrote perhaps the most infamous of books ever known. Whilst studying in Prague, he came across a copy of the Delomelanicon, a book reputedly written by the devil himself; Torchia adapted this book, creating his own volume, The Book of the Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows. This book contained a riddle whose solving would, it was said, open the ninth gate and bestow upon the solver all the powers of hell. It was this book that Boris Balkan coveted above all others, but there was one catch. Only three copies had survived - the rest were burned at the stake along with Aristide Torchia himself.  
  
It was from Balkan that Cyrus learned of the Nine Gates, or at least of its physical existence. From what Cyrus had learned he believed that there were no remaining copies of the book, but Balkan set him straight; there were, in fact, three copies - the Telfer, the Fargas and the Kessler. Andrew Telfer, a New York resident of incredible fortune, owned the first, though in name only - it was actually the prized possession of his wife, Liana. Victor Fargas, head of an old noble Spanish family, had the second as the centrepiece of his now rather depleted yet still relatively extensive demonological library. And the third belonged to the Baroness Kessler, resident of Paris, and perhaps the most eminent figure in the study of the devil. Balkan stood very little chance of being able to buy a copy from any of their current owners, unless he pried it from their cold dead hands. Cyrus couldn't say he put it past him.  
  
Cyrus himself was considered quite the demonological authority and the two frequently debated the subject, both in Balkan's library and over the telephone. Their friendly sparring in addition to their passion for the subject was part of what drove them, and also what separated them; both men knew that if the opportunity should arise, neither of them would hesitate a single second in screwing the other over for personal advancement. And that's exactly what Cyrus was attempting to do on his trip to Europe. He was attempting to acquire a copy of the Nine Gates.  
  
Victor Fargas was accommodating enough, allowing him to view his copy and make notes whilst he himself drank cognac from a large crystal glass and played a little Saint-Saëns on his antique violin. Quinta Fargas, the ancestral home of the Fargas family, was in a sorry state of disrepair, filled with damp and dry rot. Fargas was selling off his once splendid library simply to pay for its upkeep - why he didn't just sell the place and have done with it Cyrus couldn't understand. He even made him an offer - both for the house and the Nine Gates - but both were refused and Cyrus moved on.  
  
He talked with the Hermanos Ceniza in Toledo. The twins were in their seventies at the very least, and restorers of books of worldwide renown. They had owned the Telfer copy for more than forty years before they sold it on to Andrew and Liana Telfer. They smiled a lot and Cyrus found the way that they constantly finished each other's sentences rather irritating. They could tell him nothing, but sold him a few more common demonological works, which made mention of the Nine Gates. Cyrus thanked them with as much politeness as he could muster, then left for Paris.  
  
Baroness Kessler and her secretary, who reminded him somewhat of a pitbull in human clothing, were slightly less then accommodating; ten minutes after walking through the door of the Fondation Kessler, he'd been unceremoniously ejected from the building. The visit was substantially less than satisfactory.  
  
He spent three months in Paris, studying in various libraries. His idea was to study the life and works of Aristide Torchia, and that he did for the first two months, between his visits to the rare bookshop of the city. Then, however, he found a passage in a recent acquisition that turned his thoughts in another direction altogether.  
  
The volume from which he was read was indeed primarily concerned with Aristide Torchia, though buried deep in one chapter, a parenthesis in the main body of the text, as an allusion to another work, not of Torchia. The work of a fifteenth century astrologer with whom Cyrus was wholly unfamiliar. The brief mention caught Cyrus' imagination, and he set to work wheedling out every last piece of information that he could lay his hands on. Something told him this could be exactly what he was looking for.  
  
His search led him away from Paris, across the Alps and into Italy, into Venice, birthplace of Aristide Torchia. The astrologer in question was a Venetian named Basileus, a great scholar who had never until the writing of his great work shown the slightest of inclinations toward the black arts, at least not beyond astrology. The more Cyrus read, the clearer it seemed that Basileus had suffered some kind of demonic possession that inspired him to write the work, the Arcanum. Perhaps even possession of the devil himself.  
  
Only seven copies of the book had ever been produced, and even those were widely believed to be mere myth. But Cyrus believed. The day that Franklin Moss called to tell him that he now owned the land beside his estate, Cyrus' belief had proved more fruitful than he could have expected. He'd been in Venice for two weeks when he walked into a bookshop just off the Piazza San Marco and picked up a perfectly intact, perfectly preserved copy of Basileus' Arcanum.  
  
He knelt by his hotel bed that night with his rosary in his hands and told Belphegor that at last he knew what he had to do. His hand strayed as he talked and his fingertips brushed at the heavy leather cover of the book that lay on his bed, the book for which he had paid over fifty thousand dollars and for which he would have paid much, much more. He smiled.  
  
It was November 1981 when Cyrus returned home. He had work to do.  
  
*** 


	7. Dr. Beck's Proof

--7--  
  
Beck took off his glasses and rubbed at his tired eyes. He hadn't been able to sleep at all and it was beginning to catch up with him. Placing his glasses on his desk he reached for the filing cabinet just off to his right, which he'd spent maybe an hour placing when he'd first taken the job so it was as far away from the desk as possible without being out of reach. He tugged open the bottom drawer and pulled out a thick beige file marked 'Rafkin, Dennis T.'.  
  
He placed the file on the desk in front of him with a wide yawn. It was 3pm, it was too hot and he felt like if he closed his eyes for more than a blink he'd fall asleep, despite the loud whirr of the fan and the low incessant drone that was the hospital. He opened the file, gave the bridge of his nose one last pinch then put back on his glasses.  
  
He'd read the file before, of course. He'd been over it three or four times, as he had all of his patients' files. He remembered many of the details, remembered his friend Chris Van Bremen's concerns and even their first meeting, three months before. He glanced through his medical history, at the medications prescribed by Dr. Van Bremen - he had seemed to find it necessary to prescribe regular doses of painkillers and antidepressants. Dennis had been prescribed neither during his three-month stay and seemed none the worse for it. Either Van Bremen had prescribed them in the wrong dosage or they hadn't been working at all.  
  
This worried Beck. He wasn't sure how to proceed after Dennis' recent psychotic episode, out in the courtyard, claiming to have seen a ghost or some such. He'd wondered if his files could provide some insight, but he hadn't held out much hope since he'd read them all before and known that Dennis had never before professed any belief that he had psychic abilities, or that he saw ghosts. This seemed to be a new manifestation of his illness.  
  
He supposed if nothing else this new development helped to explain Dennis' condition. Obviously if he believed that he saw flashes of a person's life when touched, and those flashes were painful to him, he wouldn't want to be touched. And the idea that he saw ghosts explained his psychotic episodes. However, this 'breakthrough' of sorts did not make Dr. Beck feel any more comfortable about Dennis' progress. If anything, discovering these beliefs only made his treatment more difficult. It had been easier when Beck believed it was brought on by childhood molestation.  
  
There was a knock on the door and after a call of 'come in', Dennis entered the room. He didn't seem himself, more despondent than usual, with little of his common vigour. He sat down opposite Beck at his desk and leant back his the chair, letting his head fall back and his hands hang by his sides. He sighed.  
  
"Is something bothering you, Dennis?" Beck asked, knitting his fingers and leaning forward on his elbows.  
  
"Fuck no. You just think I'm insane, that's all", Dennis replied, not moving his head. Beck watched the muscles in his neck contract as he spoke and the movement of his Adams apple as he swallowed. He'd never really noticed how pale Dennis' skin was until that moment, almost like he'd hardly set foot out of doors in over a year. He found himself wondering if that was the case.  
  
"I don't think you're insane", he told him in a patient tone, restraining himself adding the word 'yet' under his breath. "But what happened yesterday does cause me some concern, yes".  
  
"Yeah, concern that I might be losing it", Dennis muttered.  
  
Beck shuffled his files for a moment, collecting his thoughts. "Dennis, could you tell me what happened yesterday?" Silence. Beck clicked his pen a couple of times. "You told me that you think you're psychic. Is that right?"  
  
"No, Doc - I didn't tell you that I *think* I'm psychic. I told you that I *am* psychic. There's a difference".  
  
"Yes, yes there is". Beck made a note. "And you said that you see flashes when touched".  
  
"Yep. Someone so much as brushes up against me and I get a whole lifetime's worth of shit in an instant".  
  
"Why don't you wear gloves?"  
  
"Gloves?"  
  
"So people don't touch you".  
  
"Because it doesn't work like that, genius. I could be wearing a fucking lead breastplate and I'd still be able to tell you the name of your fifth grade English teacher if you put a hand on me".  
  
Beck leant back in his chair, arms resting against his chest, fingers steepled. "So what was her name?" He knew he was being petty. He knew it was unprofessional. He was trying to tell himself that his adversarial manner was due wholly to a belief that it might benefit Dennis if his powers were proved fictional, but he knew it was more to do with his chosen area of psychology; suddenly he felt cheated into taking Dennis' case and not referring him to another member of staff. Any number of them would have gladly taken him off his hands and probably bought him a bottle of good scotch for the privilege.  
  
"Mrs. Sanchez".  
  
Beck frowned. "What did you say?" he asked, suddenly cold despite the blazing midday heat.  
  
Dennis tilted his head forward, looking straight into his eyes. "Mrs. Sanchez", he repeated.  
  
"How did you know that?" Beck demanded, leaning forward again. "You couldn't possibly have known that".  
  
"I told you, I'm psychic".  
  
"So what was. the name of my. seventh grade math tutor?"  
  
Dennis shrugged. "Damned if I know".  
  
"I thought you said you were psychic".  
  
"I am. But do you really think I go around remembering every little detail of each and every person I happen to touch in my entire life? I have a hard enough time remembering *my* seventh grade math tutor without remembering fifty thousand other people's. I remember fifth grade English teachers and middle names and I try to forget the rest. Christ, do you know how confusing it is having all these memories from all these other people floating around in my head? Sometimes I get confused and I can't remember if what I think I remember really happened to me or whether it happened to that woman I just walked into at the bus stop or the homeless guy I tripped over at the station, y'know? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I have to check to make sure that my hand's still there because some guy working at the hardware store lost his in a car accident and for some twisted reason I think that was me. Sometimes I'll wake up and the only thing I remember is watching my wife or my mother or my fucking kids dying in a house fire or some psycho carjacker plunging a knife into my chest, but you know, I don't have a wife and kids and I don't even have a fucking drivers license, let alone a car to have carjacked. So no, Doc, I can't tell you the name of your seventh grade math tutor".  
  
Beck nodded. "Touch me again and tell me".  
  
"Fuck you".  
  
"You're saying you're psychic, Dennis. I'm asking you to prove it. Is that so difficult?"  
  
"Yes! Has it escaped your notice that I touch you and I get a migraine that lasts the whole fucking day? You think I enjoy that shit?"  
  
Beck shrugged. "Well, it's up to you, Dennis. You can either prove it or not. If you touch me and you can tell me the name of my seventh grade math tutor, you'll have proved that you're telling the truth. If you can't, well, you'll have proved that you need my help more than you realise. And if you don't at least try, well, I can't help you at all. It's up to you".  
  
Dennis frowned and shifted uncomfortably in his chair, one hand grasping tightly at the chair arm and one rubbing hard at his mouth. Beck could see that he was conflicted, trying to make a decision. He guessed that it was hard for Dennis, to submit to a test that could prove or disprove his 'abilities'. On one hand he had to do it to prove that he wasn't making it up, and on the other he couldn't do it because it would prove that he was. Of course, it never crossed Beck's mind that Dennis was telling the truth, that really the only thing stopping him was searing head pains. And why would it occur to him? Beck was a psychiatrist, and until he'd met Dennis he'd known with absolute certainty that psychics were the stuff of fairytale.  
  
"Look, I'm not asking you to believe me", he said at last, head tilted down, peering up at him from under his eyebrows. "Well, okay, I guess I am. But what I'm really asking you to do is help me. You don't understand just how much this fucking hurts".  
  
"That's your choice, Dennis. You admitted yourself here, remember? You're free to leave whenever you choose".  
  
"Fuck". Dennis frowned and looked down, wringing his hands in his lap, almost rocking in his seat. "Oh fuck. I'll do it. Hell, it's only pain, right?"  
  
Beck nodded. And Dennis tentatively leant forward in his seat, reaching out his arm across the desk with its sea of papers, over his file where he recognised his photo, out to Dr. Beck's hand. He touched him.  
  
Dennis exhaled sharply and his face contorted, froze in position. He grimaced, every muscle in his body tensing, the veins standing out in his forehead. It seemed he was in genuine pain. Beck realised that his mouth was hanging open and he shut it with a snap; Dennis' eyes flew open and he threw himself back into his seat, groaning.  
  
"So?" Dennis gasped in a couple more breaths, rubbing slowly at his temples. "Dennis, his name".  
  
"Nice try, Doc", he said at last. "It wasn't a he, it was a she. Alice Nowinski. Her husband taught gym and you had the biggest crush on her."  
  
Beck couldn't answer. His mouth opened as if to speak, but no words came out. He had no words to say.  
  
Because Dennis was right. In seventh grade his math tutor was Alice Nowinski, wife of the football coach. She'd had the prettiest red hair and the longest legs he'd ever seen, and he'd been so jealous of that big NFL reject of a husband of hers. He'd see her watching him from the window while they were doing tests, that glorious smile of hers reserved just for him. And Dennis had seen it all.  
  
Dennis was telling the truth. He really was psychic.  
  
*** 


	8. The Construction Begins

--8--  
  
Construction began on Cyrus' new property in March 1982.  
  
Originally he had meant it to be the site of his mausoleum - Cyrus had always been just morbid enough to consider death without becoming too concerned, and this consideration had led him to the conclusion that his family needed a mausoleum. His mother's, father's, grandparents' and by this time a couple of aunts' and uncles' ashes were residing in his home, in sombre yet tasteful urns that were all sitting in a locked closet.  
  
The plan was to build a magnificent structure in the image of the Kriticos family mausoleum back in Greece. It would have a domed roof and magnificent marble columns, red marble flooring and a chapel with an altar for their family to pray in. He would commission artists to paint scenes of the Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, and fill it with the most beautiful religious objects that he could lay his hands on. His mausoleum would be perfect, a sanctuary out in the clearing by the woods where the morning sun would glint on the golden dome and glitter on the dewy grass. It had been his dream since he was a child, to own that land for eternity.  
  
Of course, once he had stumbled across the Arcanum, Cyrus' plans were immediately altered. If all went to plan, he would never need a mausoleum to be buried in.  
  
Construction began in March 1982. Contractors were hired from all over the world and paid enormous sums to come to America to work on Cyrus' eccentric project. French glassmakers and a Spanish glass-etcher were amongst the first to arrive, along with a team of seven Russian metalworkers and a company of New England architects with their own firm of land excavators who started work immediately on the foundations and the basement.  
  
The architects were given photocopies of the pages of the book, complete with English translations of the Latin text which accompanied the figures, all of which Cyrus had prepared himself. They crew their plans from the pages of the Arcanum, which they found to be a more than adequate base for their calculations, despite its age. But at Cyrus' insistence, all of the calculations were checked time and time again before a single post was laid.  
  
Special workshops were constructed or bought to house the many individual sections of the project - Cyrus purchased a factory for the metalworkers and had special workshops and studios built by his contractors for the glassworkers and etchers. Cyrus visited and inspected each of the projects in turn, on a rotation, as well as employing five men specially for the task of overseeing progress and making bi-monthly reports on all aspects.  
  
The construction progressed slowly but with the utmost accuracy in its every step. It was five years before the metal framework was in place, wrought in iron and set in solid stone. Two more years were needed for the proper installation of the door mechanisms, the levers, and the sheet metal lockdown doors, as well as the formation of the masterpiece of engineering at which all Cyrus' contracted engineers marvelled - the machine, the cogs of the Ocularis Room. And once all of that was in place, then the glassworkers set about the installation of the etched glass panels. Construction and installation was ongoing for almost nine years.  
  
At night, when the workers had left the 'house', Cyrus walked silently in its corridors. He read from the book, speaking soft prayers over the panels of etched glass. Soon it would all be in place. Soon. Soon his every dream would come true. There was just one small hitch.  
  
The machine had no power. But that was the next thing on his list.  
  
*** 


	9. Dennis meets Heilmann

--9--  
  
"I've never seen anything like it", Elijah Beck was saying, babbling, his voice loud and agitated. "Erik, you have to meet him. He's waiting outside. I promise you won't regret it".  
  
Erik Heilmann leaned back in his chair and took a long sip of his coffee, looking up at his old friend. Beck was pacing in front of the closed door of Heilmann's office, hunched forward slightly, uneasy looking. Heilmann watched him with his head slightly tilted, holding his coffee cup close to his chest. He couldn't say that he'd ever seen Elijah act this way, and it confused him.  
  
Beck had often derided him in the past for his ardent belief in the paranormal, in ESP. It had become a kind of running joke between them - whenever Erik mentioned his work, Elijah would make a witty debunking comment and they would both laugh. Even when Erik had left his old work behind and gone into Abnormal Psychology, the two old friends hadn't exactly seen eye to eye; Elijah saw Abnormal Psych as the realm of the cowboy psychologist, those looking for fame and a quick buck and weren't concerned with the genuine fundamentals of the study of psychology.  
  
That was why he'd so often turned down Elijah's offers of work, and why he turned down the cases of murderers and often rapists. He was and always had been primarily interested in the study of the mind for its own sake, understanding general human behaviour and reactions. He didn't care to investigate the anomalous sector of society and their abnormal psychology. That he happily left to men such as Erik Heilmann.  
  
But that day, Elijah was more excited about this 'psychic' patient of his than Erik had been about ESP in his whole life. It was intriguing if a little confusing.  
  
"What did you say his name is?" Heilmann asked.  
  
Beck stopped pacing and turned to his friend. "Dennis", he said, stooping to pick up the file wallet that he'd left leaning against the leg of the chair at the front of Heilmann's desk. "Dennis Rafkin". He took out a thick file and slid it over the desk; Heilmann took it, glancing down at the cover. 'Rafkin, Dennis T', it said in bold black letters. He frowned up at Beck. "Don't worry, he gave me permission to show you", he assured him.  
  
He opened the file. A bad photograph of Dennis stared up at him, his face grim and pale. He looked familiar somehow, though he knew they'd never met. Something in his eyes maybe, the way they shone flat and almost lifeless out of the file photo. It stirred an uneasy feeling in his gut.  
  
"You know I don't do this anymore, Elijah?" Heilmann said, flipping through the pages of the file, glancing up just long enough to punctuate his point.  
  
"Yes, I know. But trust me, Erik - once you've met Dennis, you'll never want to go back to Abnormal Psychology. This is it. Erik, he's the real thing".  
  
"Then you'd better send him in", Heilmann said.  
  
Beck was immediately at the door, opening it, beckoning through it. "Dennis, come in".  
  
Dennis was taller than either man in the room; Beck stood a healthy 5'10" whilst Heilmann had inherited his stature from his second generation Jewish immigrant father, and stood a mere 5'6". According to the file in front of him, and as he could see as he walked into the room, Dennis Rafkin was a good six feet three inches tall. He looked taller though, if simply by merit of his dark clothing and thin frame.  
  
"Dennis, allow me to introduce Dr. Erik Heilmann. Erik, this is Dennis".  
  
Heilmann stood and offered Dennis his hand from behind his desk. Dennis just smiled politely and shook his head. Heilmann withdrew his hand and motioned to the chair opposite him as Beck left the room.  
  
"So you're the expert".  
  
Heilmann cocked his head, frowning, steepling his fingers as he leant back in his padded leather chair behind his expensive leather-top desk. "And what makes you say that, Dennis?" he asked.  
  
"Dr. Beck, actually, *Erik*".  
  
Heilmann had to bite back a smile. "Well in that case yes, there are those people who would consider me an expert", he told him. "I suppose that's why Dr. Beck has brought you here to talk to me. He believes that you possess powers of extra-sensory perception. What do you think about that, Dennis?"  
  
"It took him long enough to believe me".  
  
This time Heilmann allowed himself the smile. "It would. Erik was never exactly well known for his open mind". He shuffled the pages of the file back together and set it down on the desktop.  
  
"Now, before we go any further, I want you to know that I do believe that psychics exist. I've met psychics, Dennis - I *know* they exist. ESP isn't just a figment of some science fiction writer's imagination. But I've also come across my fair share of clever fakes. It was those clever fakes that drove me out of this particular field of study, and I don't care to have my time wasted.  
  
"But, that having been said, you've convinced my friend the sceptic, so there must be some merit to your story. Now, I have some tests."  
  
Heilmann reached into the bottom drawer of his desk, rummaging around in the clutter. It was a drawer that had remained unopened in many years, full of the paraphernalia of his old research. And there, at the bottom, was what he was looking for. He pulled out the bundle of cards and set them on the desk.  
  
"I'm going to look at these cards one by one, and I want you to tell me what it is I'm looking at".  
  
He turned up the first card, concentrating on the three wavy blue lines. He remembered the last time he'd done it, years before, sitting right there in that chair. The subject had been a thirteen-year-old girl with an amazing gift who got every one of the cards wrong, and he knew why - her mother had been sitting in the chair beside her, looming over her, the disapproving look never fading from her face for a second. The girl was petrified of her mother and what she might have said if she'd got Heilmann to believe in her abilities. He could see it - the mother resented the fact that her daughter had the whole neighbourhood believing she was psychic. She resented being thrust into the limelight like that, embarrassed, ridiculed behind her back because of her daughter who she would never believe was more than a clever faker, seeking attention. Heilmann had had to let the girl go. He couldn't put her through any more torment.  
  
He stared at the wavy blue lines and waited.  
  
"I can't tell you what you're looking at", Dennis said. Heilmann looked up with a frown. "It doesn't work like that. I can't just read your mind, you know. I have to touch you. And I don't really wanna touch you just to find out what's on some card you're looking at when it feels like someone's driving railroad spikes into my head every time I touch someone, y'know?"  
  
Heilmann sighed and put down the card. "So how is this going to work? I'm going to need some kind of proof, Dennis".  
  
Dennis shrugged. "You tell me something you want me to find out from you then I touch you, I guess", he said. "I usually go for the fifth grade English teacher, but anything you want me to look for's fine".  
  
Heilmann nodded slowly, sliding the cards back into the desk. "I see. I want you to tell me. the name of my fifth grade English teacher, my wife's maiden name, my date of birth and the colour of my grandmother's eyes", he told him, well aware of how ridiculous the requests seemed. "Can you remember all of that?"  
  
"Sure". Dennis leant forward over the desk. "Which grandmother? Your mother's mother or your father's mother?"  
  
Heilmann smiled. "That's a very good question", he said. "My mother's".  
  
"Then I think it's time I shake your hand after all", Dennis said with a smile.  
  
*** 


	10. Kalina's Failure

--10--  
  
Boris Balkan called to give Cyrus the good news in November 1999. Ordinarily Cyrus would have been green with envy, except these were not ordinary circumstances by any stretch of the imagination. Cyrus couldn't say that Balkan's acquisition of the Book of the Nine Gates was of any particular interest to him, except that he had at least a little hope in him that Balkan could correctly interpret the engravings and finally reach his goal. Of course, there was also a little hope in him that Balkan would fail miserably and that when Cyrus reached his own goal he could gloat for endless hours that he had reached it first.  
  
The reason for Cyrus' disinterest in Balkan's new book - the very book that he himself had flown half way around the world searching for - was the Arcanum, and more specifically, his work with it. He knew that even if Balkan had indeed acquired a copy of the Nine Gates, there was no guarantee that it would work. There had to be a correct interpretation of the nine engravings before the reader could unlock the Ninth Gate, and whilst Cyrus knew that Balkan could do this if indeed anyone could, he still had his doubts. The Arcanum, however - all he had to do was follow the directions exactly as they were laid out. No interpretation was necessary.  
  
Cyrus was not by nature a lazy man. He hadn't cut a single corner in his entire life - all his work was first rate and no expense or labour spared. He took pride in his work, from the very smallest thing to the grandeur of the Glass House. The simple fact that he spent the majority of his life in the study of demonology, coupled with his worldly travels in search of the Nine Gates, should have shown this. But when he'd come across the Arcanum he'd known that so much effort could be saved using this book. He wasn't against interpretation, but the work of Aristide Torchia seemed unnecessarily complicated. He'd jumped at the chance to cut out all that unnecessary complication, and for the first few years it had seemed simple.  
  
Now he had run into a hurdle. But Cyrus of all people knew that such hurdles could be jumped, and if not jumped, at least bypassed. When he came across the problem of powering the machine, he knew he had to call in help.  
  
Kalina Oretzia was not what he'd expected. She walked into his home that first night looking like some Greenpeace nut he'd expect to see riding around in motor dinghies waving placards about saving whales, not the occultist he remembered from Prague. He almost changed his mind right then and there, and might have had she not walked straight over to the Arcanum and quoted the first paragraph by heart. Cyrus was suitably impressed. Regardless of their past, he decided to hire her.  
  
The book explained that the power for the machine came from thirteen ghosts. This made perfect sense to Cyrus, who had over his fifty-something years come to believe in such things; in many of the ancient texts there was described a 'tortured realm' in which dwelt the souls of those who died a violent death. He even believed he might have seen such ghosts himself, once or twice, shadowy images hovering at the corner of his vision at night in his big old house. He had to capture thirteen ghosts. Kalina was to help him in this.  
  
The book was helpful to a degree; it described the exact types of ghost that he had to capture, and the manner in which they could be contained. He had already constructed their cages - thirteen cubes of etched glass and steel, which would be housed in the basement of the Glass House. That was all set out very clearly in the book. But what it failed to detail was how exactly he was to go about actually capturing the ghosts. And that was where Kalina came in.  
  
Cyrus had had most of the ghosts picked out for six years by that point. Whilst the construction of the machine had been going on, he'd been busy researching the Black Zodiac, and deciding upon the most suitable candidates for inclusion. There must be thirteen - twelve to fulfil the Zodiac, the First Born Son, the Torso, the Bound Woman, the Withered Lover, the Torn Prince, the Angry Princess, the Pilgrimess, the Great Child, the Dire Mother, the Hammer, the Jackal and the Juggernaut. In order to fulfil the role of one of these Black Zodiac signs, the ghost had to possess certain special qualities, and it was this that consumed most of Cyrus' time. He wanted every aspect of his project to be entirely perfect, and the ghosts themselves were essential to this.  
  
The first on his list was the Torn Prince; he had originally intended to tackle the ghosts in order of sign, and he realised that in the order of things this ghost should have been the fifth. However, he also realised that the reality of the situation called for a little reorganisation of his plans. Royce Clayton, his chosen candidate for the Torn Prince, haunted an area surprisingly close to Cyrus' home, just three towns and forty-five miles away; logistically, this was the most suitable of his candidates on which to test the efficacy of the equipment and capture techniques.  
  
Kalina assured him that she had everything worked out. As Cyrus' car pulled up he could see that the ball field was prepped; the cube was stationed by third base and the spells were blaring from the speakers. Kalina stood by them with a small team of men, talking, and smiled as Cyrus walked toward them. He had to admit, everything seemed to be running smoothly. Except for the fact that there was no sign of the ghost.  
  
Kalina remained enthusiastic throughout the night, whilst the rest of Cyrus' handpicked team grew ever more pessimistic. They ran out of coffee sometime around 3am and after that Kalina insisted on waking them all up at fifteen-minute intervals and regaling them with stories of occult practices in the Czech Republic and the Near East. Cyrus, though somewhat interested by Kalina's obvious expertise, found his disappointment grew with every passing moment. There was no ghost caught that night.  
  
Nor was there a ghost caught the next day, or for the five days that the team remained camped out on the baseball field. Cyrus' impatience only grew, and Kalina anxiety became all the more obvious. She fluttered around Cyrus almost constantly, fluctuating wildly between profuse apology and assurances that everything would turn out fine. She seemed desperately eager to please, and this caused Cyrus endless perplexity. He couldn't seem to figure out exactly why she was so eager to stay on his good side. It wasn't even like he was paying well.  
  
In fact, once he'd realised that she understood the purpose of the Glass House, he'd started to wonder why she was helping him at all. He would have fired her if not for the fact that she was his best hope of capturing the ghosts he so desperately needed.  
  
First a week and then two passed. Fortunately no games were scheduled, the school having broken for summer, but slowly the people of the nearby town and students of the nearby high school were becoming curious. Twenty days of driving back and forth between his home and the field, twenty days of complete failure, and Cyrus was beyond impatient.  
  
When he confronted and fired Kalina, she went silent, all the colour draining from her face. Then she threw down her glasses, saying they didn't work, saying she could do better if he gave her the chance, saying that if the glasses had worked she could have seen the ghost and would have captured it by now, that if the others had done their jobs then the operation would have been a success. She accused everyone save Cyrus of outright incompetence and stamped down hard on the glasses, breaking them at the bridge. She looked so panicked, so wild, and so utterly ruthless that Cyrus almost kept her on just for that. Except she'd failed. For that she lost her job. He sent her away. Cyrus had the team pack away the equipment and returned home.  
  
Kneeling by his bed that evening, rosary in hand, Cyrus thought back over the past three weeks. He was certain that the glasses worked; three years of experimentation with the instructions of the Arcanum, three painstaking years of development and testing - he knew that they worked. He'd seen them in operation himself, with the ghosts in the local graveyards. Of course, none of those ghosts qualified for a place on his list.  
  
He sighed. It wasn't the glasses. If the ghost had been there, they would have seen it. But obviously the ghost wasn't there. He needed someone to tell him where the ghost was. But who?  
  
He pressed the rosary to his forehead, the beads cool against his skin.  
  
A psychic, they told him. He needed a psychic. 


	11. The Borehamwood Asylum

--11--  
  
Erik Heilmann had been sitting in the room with Dennis for only fifteen minutes before he was convinced; Dennis reached out across the table and took his hand, and after a couple of minutes where all Heilmann could do was sit and stare as Dennis' face contorted in agony, Dennis told him exactly what he'd asked him to. He knew there was no way he could've known any of that information if he hadn't been psychic. There was just no other logical explanation.  
  
The Borehamwood Institute wasn't far from Heilmann's office; just under an hour's car ride each way brought him to the gates twice a week to talk with Dennis, and Erik believed it was worth it. He got more proof from Dennis than he would ever have believed possible, and they talked, they talked for hours. Apparently Dennis had seen something in him that led him to place complete faith in him, and in those hours Dennis told him everything.  
  
In other patients Heilmann had often noted that there was a link between the onset of their psychic abilities and some form of personal trauma - after examining his files, he had believed that he would find this was the case with Dennis, be it following his molestation or his near-death experience. That wasn't the case. Dennis, it appeared, had always been psychic. His whole life he'd possessed this remarkable ability, which made his suffering at the hands of his caregivers that much more acute. Apparently Dennis saw everything that his stepbrother had done whenever he touched him, all the children he had ever abused. And there were many. He wasn't sure that he'd ever get over it.  
  
Dennis' near-death experience was linked with his childhood abuse. His stepbrother, upon discovering that Dennis had tried to tell his mother what he'd done to him, had beaten him and hadn't stopped until he was a bloody, battered mess. He'd been in hospital more than two months recovering, and for a while the doctors hadn't believed that he'd pull through. He was twelve years old then.  
  
Though Dennis had possessed his psychic abilities long before that time, there did seem to be something about it that he wasn't telling him, something that made him more uncomfortable than any subject matter. The first few times they'd talked about it Heilmann hadn't pressed, he'd just let the conversation move away in areas in which Dennis felt more secure. But after the first few weeks, he moved back, introduced it into conversation. Dennis resisted at first, but then gave way.  
  
Ghosts. That was what he told him. From the moment he'd woken from the coma, he'd been able to sense ghosts. This was a new phenomenon, one that had only come after his brush with death, and that seemed to make sense. He couldn't see them, he explain, only sense them, when they were close, or when he encountered something that had a connection to them. And in that hospital, there had been many, many ghosts.  
  
Dennis could still remember the absolute terror he'd felt when he'd seen flashes of those ghosts. It wasn't like he could look around the room and see them walking around, but he could see them clear as day when they were near him, in those blinding flashes in his head. They were like seizures, racking his whole body; the doctors hadn't known what to make of it and soon he was transferred to the psychiatric unit. However, soon enough he'd been returned home, complete with his new-found gift.  
  
There were ghosts everywhere, Dennis said. Walking down any street in any city in the world there might be a couple. In any building at any one time there could be ten or more, for the most part just wandering around, wallowing in their own pain. That was what most of them did, he thought - they just wallowed in their pain and self-pity and didn't interfere with life going on around them. The ghosts in the hospital - that was how they were. They'd died on the operating table or in an ambulance before they got there, they were murder victims or had died following car smashes, in horrendous accidents for which they blamed themselves, or more frequently, other. They'd all died violent deaths, and they haunted the hospital where they'd died, where their bodies had been taken, the halls and the theatres, the wards and the morgues. But they didn't interfere in human activity. Most didn't.  
  
But there were those ghosts who did. Dennis could only say he'd come across three in his life, and that was enough. Three violent ghosts, those who wanted revenge. And it was one of these ghosts that had caused his outburst in the courtyard of the Borehamwood Institute.  
  
Heilmann went over the incident with Beck in his office on one of his visits, but really all he could tell him was that Dennis had suffered some kind of a seizure and fallen to the floor, absolutely terrified. He'd said something about a man who'd burnt to death there at the Institute. That wasn't much to go on, but the pair of them had investigated. And found nothing. Heilmann was disappointed. He'd really wanted to believe.  
  
In the office later that week, he'd asked Dennis about it. And he was surprised by the answer.  
  
"When was the Institute built, Doc?" Dennis asked. Heilmann looked to Beck who answered quickly, 'Nineteen seventy-eight'. Dennis smiled.  
  
"Incidentally, why do you ask?" Beck asked, breaking his characteristic silence for the second time in the meeting.  
  
"This guy died here around nineteen ten", he said. "I'm thinking your records don't go back quite that far".  
  
He was right. Obviously the records for an establishment that had only been in existence for just under thirty years wouldn't have records stretching back to the turn of the century. But the county offices did. Whereas Beck would probably have dismissed the whole affair as Dennis' fantasy, Heilmann felt he had to check. He had to be sure.  
  
Erik Heilmann was a psychologist of world renown. He'd written over thirty books during his career, many of which were required reading for psychology courses around the world. He'd been translated into seventeen languages and had travelled the globe giving lecture tours to halls filled to capacity with his admiring peers. He had an immaculate reputation in Abnormal Psychology and a somewhat dubious past dabbling in the paranormal, but that had long since been forgiven. Heilmann was as legitimate as a psychologist could get.  
  
Lately that dubious past had begun to catch up with him. Beck had asked him to meet with Dennis Rafkin and suddenly the whole psychic question had been brought back; Heilmann had never forgotten his old interest, and after meeting with Dennis he'd rescheduled classes and meetings and important events so he could continue to meet with him. He believed Dennis possessed the abilities which he had believed in so strongly for so long. He believed in the existence of ESP, and he believed that Dennis could help him to prove this.  
  
But no matter Heilmann's beliefs about ESP, he had never believed in ghosts. It seemed almost contradictory to think it, but he believed that ghosts were quite firmly figments of the imagination, best confined only to the realm of fantasy. But he found himself wanting to believe Dennis. He found he cursed himself for his prejudices when all the time he had fought against the prejudices of others. That was why he went to the county records department, to the library, and checked out the area upon which the Borehamwood Institute stood.  
  
His preliminary checks did not seem promising. He could find no records for the site that dated further back than the current Institute, built there in 1978, and he already knew that the only people to die on the site since its opening were considered natural causes. But he checked further.  
  
Following several hours on the phone, several hours talking with archive and council staff, and several hours of reading, he was all but ready to leave and give up. But then he found it. Tucked away at the back of the records, in an old leather-bound volume that must have dated from the early 1900's itself, he found the records.  
  
They were the patient names from an old hospital - or more accurately, from an old asylum. It seemed that the Institute stood on extremely apt ground; it occupied the site of the old Borehamwood Asylum, which Heilmann had doubted had ever existed. He had of course, like all psychologists in the area, heard of the place, but since no records remained and no one seemed to remember where the place had stood before its destruction around the turn of the century, it had been dismissed as myth.  
  
Its practices were infamous. Peopled by the criminally insane and staffed by the typically rigid doctors of the time, the Borehamwood Asylum had become both respected and derided by the medical community at large, dismissed as an oddity of the system as its patients suffered mysterious injuries and deaths. Second only in infamy to the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute in California in the 1930's, it seemed Borehamwood had suffered a cruel fate and burned to the ground sometime between 1910 and 1920.  
  
All the patients and doctors there at the time had escaped the blaze. All except one - the murderer and rapist Ryan Kuhn. Unable to stand physical contact, he allowed himself to burn to death rather than be saved by the fire fighters.  
  
Dennis didn't seem surprised when he told him what he'd found. He just smirked and nodded, like he'd known all along. Heilmann realised he had.  
  
Dennis was very, very special. Dennis was all the proof he needed. 


	12. Kalina's Betrayals

***  
  
--12--  
  
The news came a week after the baseball field debacle that Kalina had switched sides. Cyrus hadn't seen it coming and he cursed himself for it. He should have had the foresight to see that the miserable little wench would go against him if he fired her, but he supposed he'd had more on his mind than the possibility that Kalina would fall in with Damon Marshall, of all people.  
  
It seemed that Marshall had discovered a little of Cyrus' plan. Apparently he had his own copy of the Arcanum and had been alerted when Cyrus and his team had shown up at the baseball field. Now he was pursuing Cyrus with a fury usually reserved for religious fanatics. Everywhere he went all he heard was Marshall's accusations, as though capturing ghosts were some great infringement on the US Constitution. Cyrus figured he was on pretty solid legal ground as far as his 'enslavement of the dead' went, since legally ghosts weren't acknowledged to exist, let alone hold rights.  
  
But Damon had other ideas, it seemed. Everywhere Cyrus went he was lurking in the shadows. It was bothersome to say the least, especially as everywhere Damon went, Kalina followed. She'd probably told him exactly what it was that Cyrus was planning. In fact, Cyrus wouldn't have been surprised to find that Kalina herself was the one who alerted Damon and his little band of militants.  
  
They impeded his search for a psychic as effectively as anyone could have in their position. It turned out that spoilt little rich boy Damon Marshall had friends in high places, if any place could be considered particularly high in the area of parapsychological research, and Cyrus' every turn was blocked. There was no university department in the country that would even take his phone calls by the time Damon was through calling in his favours, and the list of freelance psychic researchers was somewhat limited even before Damon started to contact them. Cyrus was appalled. He hadn't come so far just to watch his life's work - his lifelong dream - be ruined by a little ingrate like Damon Marshall.  
  
And more importantly, he would not lose to Kalina. He refused.  
  
So he did the one thing he could do. He picked up the phone and he called her.  
  
The conversation was brief and to the point. It didn't take more than five minutes for him to persuade Kalina to switch allegiances, and he hadn't expected it to. After all, as one of his foremen had pointed out to him back at the baseball field, she was clearly besotted with him. He could have asked her to drop everything to join a cult and spend the rest of her life growing organic vegetables in Idaho and she would've done it. All he had to do was promise her that they'd be together forever once the Ocularis Infernum was opened. That was all it took. She was so easy to break.  
  
He couldn't believe that he hadn't noticed her affections before. Surely, considering their previous romantic entanglement back in Prague, he should have understood. Actually, he found the depth of her apparent affection for him rather unsettling. But he didn't dwell on it for long. He just hoped that Kalina made a better spy than she had a ghost trapper. Surely there had to be something she was good for.  
  
*** 


	13. Dennis' Inappropriate Anecdotes

--13--  
  
By his own admission, Dennis' only long-term relationship had been with his own right hand. Considering that it caused him excruciating pain every time he touched or was touched by another living person, the fact was hardly surprising. In fact, it was quite shocking that he'd managed to have the number of non-autoerotic sexual experiences that he'd actually had, even if most of these had been forced and resulted in blackouts and/or time spent in a hospital bed.  
  
Once, Dennis told Heilmann, he's picked up a prostitute. He was seventeen then, and he'd stolen his stepbrother's battered old Chevy; he'd driven around for a couple of hours without a licence and without insurance, knowing that his stepbrother would probably beat him within an inch of his life when he got home, if he got home. He'd actually stolen the car thinking that he might go out and drive into a tree doing ninety or something. He'd never liked the idea of suicide, but somehow there was something very cool and James Dean about dying in a car wreck.  
  
But then, just as he'd been giving a little more thought to finding a nice solid tree or a suitably stable wall to aim the car at, he'd driven into a part of town he didn't really recognise. And then he saw her, the whore at the side of the road. He couldn't help himself; he stopped and the next thing he knew she was strolling over calm as you like, leaning down at the passenger side window. He let her in. The negotiation he didn't remember but thirty seconds later he was driving away with her sitting right beside him.  
  
He told her not to touch him, and she didn't. He drove with hands steadier than he really felt and pulled up in the parking lot in front of the nearest motel he could find. The guy behind the front desk didn't seem to think anything of the seventeen-year-old boy and the gaudily dressed hooker who checked in, just handed over the key and palmed the cash from the counter. Dennis led her from reception to the room and let them both in. She sat on the bed. She asked what he wanted.  
  
Dennis didn't have an answer. There was nothing that he could do with her that wouldn't feel like acupuncture performed directly on his brain. He frowned and stared at his hands.  
  
"Maybe I could just watch", he said at last, in a voice so tiny that the hooker almost didn't hear him. But she nodded and started to undress.  
  
He watched. He fumbled with his belt and clumsily jerked himself off as he watched her. She was so beautiful to him that it brought tears to his eyes and in the end he couldn't watch her anymore, he was just hunched there, a lanky, awkward seventeen-year-old with his dick in his hand, sobbing and pathetic. He left forty dollars on the nightstand and left her there.  
  
Thus concluded the sexual life of Dennis Rafkin.  
  
He told the story like it was some humorous little anecdote and Heilmann felt vaguely sorry for him even though he knew that wasn't the point of the story. Dennis himself probably wasn't aware of the point of the story, but Heilmann understood it well enough; it was part of that same class of story that Dennis liked to tell so very often, all adding up to one thing. He was trying to distance himself from him, and in doing so excusing himself for every time he'd distanced anyone. Dennis couldn't be touched. Dennis was alone.  
  
It wasn't the sort of story that Heilmann was interested in, however. He listened just the same, letting Dennis know that he'd listen without prejudice to anything he had to say, before he pressed a little for the sort of story that he *did* want to hear. These were harder to prise from him, and frequently Dennis would just dart back behind his strange little anecdotes about the time he thought he'd sensed the ghost of Elvis on Union Avenue or the time he was taking his driving test and woke up in hospital the next morning to find he'd passed out and crashed when the examiner accidentally brushed his shoulder. But sometimes, just sometimes, Heilmann got the stories he wanted.  
  
That particular day, what Heilmann wanted him to talk about was his mother. It was the private stories, the memories, his childhood and people's attitudes to him that Heilmann was most interested in then, because he was weighing up his chances of success if he asked Dennis the question he wanted to ask.  
  
"So what happened when you arrived home, Dennis?" Heilmann asked, hoping to steer the conversation.  
  
Dennis shrugged. "Stepbrother was still down the street with his girlfriend, probably molesting her kids. He never even noticed the car was gone. My mom was the only one home".  
  
"And what was her reaction?"  
  
"She told me not to do it again".  
  
"Was she always so lenient with you?"  
  
"Yeah, pretty much".  
  
"She wasn't. perturbed by your stealing the car?"  
  
"She thought I borrowed it. I came back".  
  
"And she didn't tell your stepbrother?"  
  
"No. She knew what he'd do if he found out".  
  
"Were you ever angry that she didn't stop him from hurting you?"  
  
"No".  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"She couldn't have stopped him if she'd wanted to. And I don't think she wanted to, really. I think she thought it was good for me, that he was God's way of punishing me for the way I am".  
  
"The way you are?"  
  
"Psychic, Doc".  
  
"So your mother knew?"  
  
"She knew. She chose to ignore it, though. Used to freak her out. She used to say it was my fault she and dad got the divorce. Y'know, that the freaky kid drove him away. But only when she'd been drinking".  
  
"Did she drink a lot?"  
  
"Not really".  
  
"Did it make you angry when she said those things?"  
  
"No, not really. I mean, it's true. Who wants a kid who passes out when you touch him and sits through dinner telling you that his kindergarten teacher likes to torture puppies? They thought I was nuts".  
  
"What did they say to that?"  
  
"They told me to shut up and go to my room".  
  
"They didn't believe you?"  
  
"Not about the ghosts. Maybe not about the rest, most of the time. They liked to pretend that I made it all up. Attention seeking. That's what the schools all said. That I just wanted attention".  
  
Heilmann frowned. "Has no one ever believed you?"  
  
Dennis shrugged. "Dr. Beck does", he said. "You do".  
  
"No one else?"  
  
"I don't think so, no. But Dr. Van Bremen almost did, I think. Everyone else just thinks I'm nuts".  
  
"Wouldn't you like to prove them wrong?"  
  
Dennis smirked. "I hate to break this to you, but I *am* nuts, Doc".  
  
"But you're also undoubtedly psychic, Dennis".  
  
"That too".  
  
"And wouldn't you like to prove it, once and for all?"  
  
Dennis leant closer, his elbows resting on the desk. "What did you have in mind?" he asked.  
  
Heilmann took a deep breath and asked Dennis the question he'd been waiting over a month to ask.  
  
*** 


	14. A Phone Call and a Report

--14--  
  
It turned out that Kalina was much more adept in her new role than she had been in her last; Cyrus soon learned each and every last one of Damon's petty plans of sabotage, as well as the one piece of information that he'd been hoping to get. Damon - aside from being exactly the kind of insolent brat for whom Cyrus had no tolerance - was an expert linguist. It seemed the otherwise inept little whelp had a great natural talent for languages, which Cyrus, for all his learning, was lacking.  
  
This, however, was not the information; Cyrus had long since learned of Damon's particular talent from his various sources within various universities and professional institutions. The information was that Damon had taken it upon himself to make certain. recordings. They were apparently summoning spells, which may or may not increase Cyrus' chances of capturing the ghosts he needed to power the Ocularis. He needed those spells. And poor old faithful Kalina agreed to get them for him.  
  
Kalina had just left when the telephone rang. Cyrus closed the front door and swept over the phone, picking it up with the satisfied smile still on his face.  
  
"Kriticos".  
  
"I have news for you, Cyrus".  
  
Cyrus frowned. "Who is this?"  
  
"There will be a conference - a demonstration of sorts - held in the Psychology department of the University of Massachusetts in two days' time. I hear you need a psychic. You might do well to look there".  
  
"Who is this?"  
  
"Beck, Cyrus. Elijah Beck".  
  
And the phone went dead.  
  
--the following day--  
  
Erik Heilmann had a fascinating and extensive collection of material concerning extrasensory perception. He'd hidden it away in his private library in his home for years, but slowly it was making a reappearance in his office at the University of Massachusetts. His students were beginning to remark on it, even if his colleagues had too much respect for him to do so. It was interspersed with his volumes on abnormal psychology on his bookshelves, and papers and journals littered his desk and every flat surface in the place. For the first time in years, Heilmann's office truly felt like home.  
  
It was there that Dennis found the paper on Yamamura Shizuko.  
  
It happened in 1955, in Tokyo. Dr. Ikuma Heihachiro had brought a patient of his to the university there and arranged a demonstration of what he was convinced was genuine psychic ability. She sat on the stage and Dr. Ikuma administered the test of her abilities in front of an auditorium full of onlookers. Her every answer was perfect. It seemed that she was indeed the real deal.  
  
But then something happened. A member of the audience - later revealed to be a member of the press - leapt to his feet with a shout of 'fraud!' Others followed suit and soon the whole hall was in uproar. No one wanted to believe what they were seeing, and so they denied all that they had seen. The subject was disgraced, as was Dr. Ikuma. His reputation fell in tatters.  
  
The reporter died right then and there, in that hall. The subject of the test - Yamamura Shizuko - died within a year. So vilified by the press that she was unable to live with her disgrace, Shizuko killed herself.  
  
Dennis read the article three times. It was magnetic, like he couldn't stop reading. There was something about it that struck a chord in him, thinking about what he'd agreed to do.  
  
Dennis took the paper and lay it on Dr. Heilmann's desk, where he'd be sure to find it in the morning. He'd be coming in after the demonstration.  
  
*** 


	15. The Demonstration

--15--  
  
The hall was full.  
  
Heilmann had taken the liberty of booking the largest Psychology department lecture theatre for the event, and it seated two hundred and fifty people easily, without counting the students crowding the aisles and standing along the back and sitting in front of the first row. There were over three hundred people there. And they were all there to see Dennis Rafkin.  
  
Dr. Heilmann walked out to the centre of the stage and motioned for silence. A deathly hush fell over the auditorium and he stood at the lectern, shuffling his notes.  
  
"Good morning. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for coming", he began. "It has been some time since I last ventured into this particular field of study, as some of you will know. I abandoned my first love for a safer route, and today I almost wish that I had had the courage of my convictions. I did not. But today, I find I have regained my courage.  
  
"I have brought you here today to share with you something. something truly amazing and as yet unexplained by science. Today we are here to prove the existence of ESP, extrasensory perception - that is to say, I have brought you here today to prove that there is more to the human mind than can be adequately explained. Psychic ability rests no longer in the realms of science fiction but, as we will prove today, a solid and substantiated fact.  
  
"I have brought you here today to meet a very special individual. His name is Dennis Rafkin. And he is a psychic".  
  
That was Dennis' cue. He took a deep breath, smoothed down the front of his new black jacket with the heels of his hands and walked out onto the stage.  
  
He knew where he was supposed to sit. Over the past couple of days Dr. Heilmann had been over it with him time and time again, under the pretence of wanting to make him feel at home with the situation. Dennis knew better than this - it wasn't for Dennis' ease but for the doctor's. He was possibly more nervous about the whole affair than Dennis was himself, and with good reason. Dennis had nothing to lose, after all.  
  
He took his seat and Dr. Heilmann walked over, taking the seat opposite from him across the desk that was set there on the stage. Heilmann placed his hand on the deck of cards sitting to his left and looked at Dennis. Dennis had a hard time meeting his eyes.  
  
"Are you ready?" Heilmann asked.  
  
"As I'll ever be", Dennis replied. Heilmann nodded, switching on the microphone.  
  
"In order for Dennis to read my mind, he has to be in physical contact", he said, turning his head to the audience. "This causes him great pain, but he has agreed to undergo this demonstration in order to prove the validity of his abilities. I will ask my assistant to choose three cards at random; she will view them and then pass them to me. I will view them and will then shuffle them back into the pack. I will then touch Dennis on the back of his hand and he will tell us the cards that were chosen".  
  
Heilmann beckoned to his assistant - a PhD student from his department - and she took the cards from him. She shuffled them, and chose three. She turned each over and showed them to the audience, then passed them to Dr. Heilmann who looked at them briefly himself before returning them to the pack and passing that pack to his assistant.  
  
Then he reached over the table and touched Dennis.  
  
He froze in place. His face contorted. His breath caught in his throat, then he choked in another and let his head drop to the table. This wasn't worth it. No way.  
  
He knew what the cards were. He saw them as clearly as he saw Dr. Heilmann, as he saw him boning the assistant in her dorm room a couple of hours before, as he felt the guilt of betraying his wife and the anticipation of realising his lifelong dream. The queen of hearts, the ace of spades and the three of diamonds.  
  
He took one long deep breath and motioned for the microphone.  
  
"Nine of hearts, six of clubs, king of spades", he said.  
  
There were three seconds of stunned silence. Then the hall erupted.  
  
When he looked up, Heilmann was frowning at him. He shrugged.  
  
"I'm sorry", he said.  
  
"What are you doing?"  
  
Dennis reached over the desk and took the microphone from Heilmann's hand.  
  
"I'm sorry I've wasted your time", he said. "I'm a fraud".  
  
And he left the stage, the whole room staring after him.  
  
*** 


	16. Heilmann's End

--16--  
  
Heilmann couldn't face the audience. He sat there for maybe a minute after Dennis left, completely unable to move, before he stormed away, back to his office.  
  
He knew his reputation was in tatters. He probably wouldn't recover from this, at least not into any reputable psychological society. He'd be condemned to the realm of new age literature babbling about paranormal phenomena, if he even achieved that. He wasn't sure he'd want to even if he could. He'd made a gross error in judgement.  
  
His secretary informed him that he'd had a call from his wife. He sighed and walked into his office, not feeling like phoning his wife at all, especially after what he'd done with his PhD student that morning. He picked up the cup of coffee that the secretary put in front of him and took a large mouthful, swilling it around, hoping to rid himself of the bitter taste but already quite sure that it would take more than unsweetened black coffee. He set it down and cursed when he saw the ugly ring it imprinted on the papers.  
  
He hadn't left any papers there, he was sure. He always cleared his desk before leaving for home, without fail, every night. All the papers went into his briefcase, and they were still there. He picked up the paper.  
  
Immediately he recognised it. A friend working in Japan had faxed the report through to him unexpectedly one day five or six years earlier, knowing that he'd had some interest in the field and had once inquired about the case. The name smiled up at him from the top of the sheet. Yamamura Shizuko.  
  
The irony wasn't lost on him. He'd been planning to come into the office that morning to pick up the tie he had lying in his desk drawer - a Christmas present from his wife - but he'd met Molly in her dormitory instead. If he'd just come into the office that morning, none of this would have happened. He would have seen the report lying there out of place on the clear desktop and he would have known what Dennis was planning. It was so clear.  
  
Dennis was scared. He didn't want to face a vilifying crowd, all those accusations and all that fanatical disbelief. He didn't want to be put through it, and he'd decided that he wasn't going to let what happened to Yamamura Shizuko happen to him. That's what the report told him, sitting there so seemingly innocent on the otherwise bare desk. If only he'd seen it before. If only.  
  
Heilmann rested his head down beside the paper. The phone was ringing but he wasn't going to pick it up. He was going to sit there and let his career fall apart around him. There was nothing else he could do.  
  
***  
  
The career of Dr. Erik Heilmann, as he had suspected, never fully recovered. He became a regular on several talk shows and began to express an interest in paranormal phenomena outside his usual area of ESP, but he never regained his previous status. He never even tried. He just settled into his new life and never looked back.  
  
He made good money but his wife divorced him. Elijah Beck never called him again. He was never asked to consult with the FBI and he was never put on the case of another serial offender. Instead he wrote books about haunted houses and people who could read minds. All reputable psychologists shunned him. He was too bitter by that time to care at all.  
  
He never did prove the existence of ESP. Maybe he never convinced another living soul of its existence, either. But that didn't matter. He'd met Dennis Rafkin and he knew it was real.  
  
Heilmann died alone in a small apartment in New York. He was seventy-four years old and had written fifty-six books. You probably wouldn't find any of them if you looked, unless you're a psychology student. Some schools still use his textbook, though they're careful to note that the author lost his mind sometime after he'd written it.  
  
*** 


	17. The End

--17--  
  
When Dennis left the university, he was alone. He'd spent an hour just sitting in the bathroom feeling ill, waiting for his migraine medication to kick in. When it did, when the pain in his head had dulled to a bearable ache, he left the building and walked toward the parking lot. He'd made sure he knew where the bus stop was. He'd be needing a bus to get home.  
  
He'd checked himself out of the Institute that morning. As he'd never officially been committed, he was free to come and go as he pleased, and it pleased him to leave. He didn't want to be anywhere that Drs. Beck or Heilmann could find him. He had the distinct impression that neither of them would have anything particularly complimentary to say if they ever saw him again.  
  
There were students milling around and Dennis felt strangely vulnerable there, around them. Maybe some of them had been there for the demonstration. Maybe they were laughing at him. That was okay, he was used to being laughed at. He was only twenty-three. He should've fit in with them. He didn't. He was different. He was smart though and maybe if he hadn't had that, that fucking *curse* then he could be there with them. He would've taken English. He always liked English. He liked reading. None of the characters he read about had searing pains in their head whenever they touched someone else.  
  
He stood at the bus stop behind all the students. The bus was going into town and that's where he wanted to go, so he could walk home, back to his apartment. He wasn't sure that it'd still be there, really. Well, the apartment would be there, but his landlady had probably evicted him by now. He hadn't paid his rent in months, and even if she liked how he could tell her anything she wanted to know about her past just by touching her and how he'd talk to her for hours about her favourite soap operas like they were some exalted art form, he was costing too much for her to keep him there.  
  
He dug in his pockets. Not enough change. He was screwed. He waved the bus on and stood at the kerb watching the little ripples of water in the puddle of rainwater around his shoes. He was screwed.  
  
"Dennis".  
  
He heard the voice clearly enough but he didn't turn. He didn't know that voice. It was far enough away and he was paying sufficiently little attention that maybe it was Beck or Heilmann suddenly out for blood. He didn't want to know.  
  
"Dennis".  
  
Closer now. No, he didn't know the voice. Maybe they'd sent someone for him. He sighed and turned around.  
  
There was a man walking toward him.  
  
"Dennis, I'm Cyrus Kriticos", said the man.  
  
Dennis nodded. After the mysterious phone call he'd had the night before, he'd been wondering when this guy would turn up.  
  
He waited, looking at Cyrus, the well-dressed man in front of him. But he didn't even bother to offer him his leather-gloved hand. Dennis almost smiled. That was a good sign. It was the best sign he'd had in years.  
  
Maybe he wasn't so screwed after all.  
  
***  
  
There was a limousine waiting, and Dennis was ushered into it. Cyrus had a proposition for him, exactly as he'd promised he would when he'd told him to bow out of the demonstration. He'd told him it was better to be branded a fraud and to remain anonymous, and Dennis knew he was right.  
  
All Cyrus had had to say was that he'd never have a moment's peace in his life if he went through with it. Every day there'd be someone there, asking him to prove it again, asking him to go touch a murderer and find out if he'd really done it, asking him to talk to the ghost of their dead aunt, asking him to go on some talk show and be surrounded by people, crowds, everywhere for the rest of his life. It was enough to make Dennis panic. He knew he couldn't go through with it.  
  
Heilmann be damned, he was saving himself. Let the quack think what he wanted to believe. Dennis was looking out for number one.  
  
And Cyrus Kriticos had a proposition for him. He'd never have to see his family again if he went through with it. He could live alone and never see anyone again if he didn't want to. He'd be peaceful.  
  
All he had to do was catch twelve ghosts. That couldn't be so hard. Just twelve ghosts and he'd never have to feel that pain ever again. Cyrus would see to it.  
  
First on the list was Royce Clayton. And Dennis knew just where to find him.  
  
*** End *** 


End file.
